Preserving Cancelled & Unreleased Video Game History Since 1999
Welcome to Games That Weren't!
We are an Cancelled & Unreleased Video games archive with prototypes, developer history and assets for many computers and consoles of all ages. A non-profit large archive dedicated to preserving lost games that were never released to the public. Sharing history and stories from the developers, assets and more before it is too late. GTW has been preserving lost video game history online since 1999, and long before that offline.
Please Browse our archive and discover the many entries that we host for many different platforms.
Ah nooooo…. not another puzzler!… The 10,000th puzzler i’ve had to go through for GTW, i’m sure!
It’s also another game that came with no instructions, so i’m not sure what you have to do. After some fiddling around with the game, I was only able to produce some strange shapes on the screen.
Apparently being created by Double Density, who produced some great little C64 games for the German market, this one has the graphical polish of their games, and their typical style.
This seems to be an early preview, as there are no titles or anything apart from the actual game itself, which doesn’t seem to be very playable.
No credits are present, so another game that should take some work to find out more about.
A quick entry, but this educational game was advertised early in 1984 in a few magazines as a list of games coming soon from Comm*Data / Channel Software.
This title has been missing for so many years, but Allan Pinkerton has managed to help us find the game in 2015, and so here it is!
Released in very limited numbers it seems, but released none the less!
Thanks to Peter Weighill for the heads up for our next title. Math Farm is a US based educational game which was described in its Nanosec advert (and this second advert) as follows:
"This exciting educational game features vivid, colourful screens that support any child’s imagination. Teaches multiplication, division, addition and subtraction using large, easy to read numbers, linked with object and relational techniques. Hi-res color graphics and sound are supported and optimized by the use of speech synthesis. Speech is program supported and no additional hardware is necessary. Now learning is fun… now the computer talks to your child."
Overall from the screenshots, this looked like quite a good educational game for 1984.
But what happened to the game?… Well, two other Nanosec games did seem to make it, but this and Ground Zero seem to have got lost somewhere in time.
Did Nanosec go under just before those two games could get released? We are not sure, but luckily we have some developer names attached and hopefully we will find out more soon.
Could it just be that this is a very obscure game yet to be fully preserved? Do you have it in your collection?
Math-a-graph is a game by the creator of Coined and was a Mario Picross clone that wasn’t quite finished. Basically the game was almost finished, and is a very playable game at the moment and also has a level editor.
Nico however is not a graphician and the development stopped as he could not find someone who wanted to do some graphics. As a result the game will likely never be finished.
Recently Nico has compiled like promised, a preview version of what he had and has released it onto CSDB and allowed us to place the preview here. He has also requested for graphic artists and musicians who would be interested in contributing to the game to finally finish it off for good! Great news!
For now, check out the 5 level preview which has been released and enjoy this wonderful Picross clone! :-)
A very quick entry, mainly as we don’t have much on it just yet. But Jason Kelk flags up to GTW that a 3rd Mastertronic Loader game was created but unused.
Apparently Chris Young, who was on work experience at Mastertronic at the time, said that the game got messed up at the mastering factory and as a result was never used. When we asked Richard Aplin about the game, he couldn’t recall anything about it. And the reason why, was because it was done by a different developer.
The long lost 3rd loader was to be “Munch Load”, which was produced by John N.W Cheeseman (or John Cheesman). Munch Load was actually a game which was written to go along with a new loader called “Cheeseloader”. It’s a simple game as you might expect, but very playable and would have been enjoyed for sure by tape gamers.
The game itself got leaked however in 1994 through dodgy means, which can be read about in the note files in the download here. It’s an interesting story, but essentially the game was leaked from a demo disk that was sent to Ocean by John. Leaked by similar means then to how Plotting was leaked.
In 2016, a proper version of the game and fully fixed was released by Hokuto Force, which you can download from here thanks to those guys. Cheeseload seems to be very much at large at the moment, but is probably outside of our remit to search for :)
Hopefully some day we may hear more from John himself about the loader and the game. But for now, check it out and the interesting back story!
I’ve seen some funny sick games on the C64, the recent releases of Blood 1 and 2 are two of them. Massacre was another game attempting to push the boundaries of sickness.
Simply you have a target, and you are mean’t to massacre all the soldiers which walk across the battlefield.
That is it in this preview, there is one very simple screen with some simple characters that get shot down.
There isn’t much therefore offered in this preview so far, and its not known how much further the game got before being scrapped. No full game has ever been seen.
Credits are also unknown for this game, so its guessing as where to start searching for information on this game.
A rarity this one… actually seeing Mario on the home computers. Released on PC and other formats, this was no action adventure like the games we all know, but a kids adventure title which you’d most likely find in a school or something.
Commodore Power magazine had the following to say upon news of its conversion… "Mindscape must have given Nintendo a huge lunch or something as it’s got the rights to use Mario for educational purposes – so you’ll be seeing the cheeky man appear on your Commodore 64 in the first game ‘MARIO IS MISSING’ – which deals with geography. At least you’ll pass your O-level plumbing exam!”
We’re not sure exactly how far this ever reached, but Mindscape already hadn’t released many of their planned titles and this seems to be an idea which never got past the planning stage. 1992 was when a lot of companies were starting to move to the 16-bit platforms sadly.
Of course, we will try and find out more, but it is going to be hard with no leads whatsoever. We’ll just have to hope that something turns up soon…
Firstly… this is not the same as the Ocean version released version that came in around 1986/87… but Atarisoft were actually doing an official conversion themselves back in the early 80’s.
We learn of this conversion thanks to Mat Allen who has documented the conversion briefly in Digital Press. The game itself seems to have sneaked out and was on Gamebase (Which is the entry we have borrowed).
Originally we believed the game was not released due to the video game crash, but actually it was due to issues with development – where the brick layers would not bulge on impact. Although the game was pretty much completed, it was decided not to fully release the game. Later on, Ocean Software did their own conversion of the game – but this is an interesting curiosity to check out.
However on a separate note, Phobos/Ready64 found a snippet in Video Game Update (August 1984 – see scans) which suggests that Jack Tramiel got Atarisoft to stop all C64 developments and focus just on Atari. It wasn’t the video game crash that caused the cancellation of titles. Thanks to Roberto Nicoletti and Phobos for the heads up.
We’re not sure how the game got leaked, but it is lucky that it has been – so you can see a different approach to the conversion.
Made by the same company who made Tank Attack, Marine Attack was to be released by CDS Software sometime around the late eighties. There is no real information on this game, merely a reference to its existence in a statement by CDS about Tank Attack and in the Zzap! magazine review of Tank Attack.
Judging from the reference in Zzap! Magazine, the game was intended as a sequel to Tank Attack, which was a board game/computer game hybrid, where players played on a game board with playing pieces, with the computer acting as a sort of moderator. Marine Attack would have been similar but with cruisers and battleships instead of tanks. CDS must have been confident of having a hit with Tank Attack to be already working on the follow up before the game was even released.
Although an innovative concept, it may have been a contributing factor as to the game’s downfall, as with increased costs of production would come increased pressure for sales and if Tank Attack did not do spectacularly well then perhaps Marine Attack was pulled due to unacceptable risk. On the other hand by planning the follow up before the release of Tank Attack it suggests CDS were confident of having funding to push forward with a release. Nonetheless Tank Attack garnered some positive reviews, getting 80% in Zzap! magazine.
A problem for us is that if the game does ever turn up, its highly unlikely it will come with a playing board and playing pieces, as these would probably have been made after the computer game was created and so may have never even existed. So even if we find the computer-based section of the game its possible it will be unplayable.
In any case it’s a shame the game never saw the light of day, with the retro scene alive and well it would be nice to see both Tank Attack and Marine Attack set up alongside each other at retro events for gamers old and new to play.
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